Friday, 23 October 2015

Drinking and happiness

I've been thinking quite a bit recently
about happiness and drinking. This was
prompted by a
call for papers on leisure and happiness I was interested in. Initially I thought I could flog the
dead horse of the carnivalesque again, thinking of drinking - or at least
the night-time economy - as a form of leisure, but mulling it over I've started
to wonder whether there's anything we can usefully say about drinking and
happiness at all.

I've
written before about drinking and pleasure, and how I can't see that the
concept of 'pleasure' is much use analytically at all. From some perspectives, notably economics, if
we do something we must by definition find it pleasurable at some level. On the other hand, if we start to try to
develop the concept into something a bit more nuanced, then it falls
apart. Is anything we do solely about
'pleasure'?

I remember at school being asked a question
as part of an introduction to philosophy pleasure: would you commit to spend
the rest of your life in a pleasure machine?
Of course, plenty of philosophers would say no, as this wouldn't amount
to 'fulfilment' (or Aristotle's
'eudaimonia'), but I've never quite been convinced it isn't better to be
the utilitarian 'happy pig' than an unhappy philosopher. It was suggested to me at school that it
wouldn't be pleasurable to be connected to such a machine, as you need the lows
to appreciate the highs. But my response
was (and would still be) that if that's the case, the pleasure machine is flawed. Those lows are not pleasurable in
themselves.

So immediately we have this idea that true
pleasure or happiness comes from there also being 'lows' or unhappiness. And in practice that's the case not just with
opposing leisure (pleasure) to work (unhappiness and/or fulfilment) - and there's
plenty of academic work on this. In
fact, almost any action, or leisure activity, is imbued with something more complex
than happiness or pleasure.

If we think of drinking, the whole reason
I've employed the concept of the carnivalesque is that people aren't completely
happy and comfortable just feeling pleasure on their nights out. Part of the thrill and excitement is the discomfort,
uncertainty, risk and so forth. And the
feeling of drunkenness is certainly something more than simply happiness or pleasure. There might be a stage of drunkenness people
describe as being pleasurable, but it's only one element of drinking, and not
many would equate it with being (necessarily) happy.

At first sight, drug use is the ideal
example of something that might approximate a 'pleasure' machine - the
substances supposedly stimulate our nervous system to give us chemically-induced
pleasure. But it's all a bit more
complicated than that. There aren't many
drug users who would simply talk in terms of pharmacological pleasure - and as a
recent posting on Points reminded me, we do actually have to learn how to
find certain experiences positive rather than disconcerting and unpleasant.

But perhaps once we've done that learning,
drug use might make us 'happy'. However, I'd suggest
that people's 'happiness' isn't directly related to their substance use, and
they wouldn't discuss it in those terms.

And it's not just about nights out. In leisure studies there's an idea of 'serious' leisure, where the activity
as seen as requiring practice, expertise, knowledge and so forth. It is a form of working on one's body and/or
life. Such a model of leisure might make
sense of some
approaches to wine or craft beer - there is a canon of knowledge the expert
needs, this isn't about pleasure or even happiness quite, and there is work and
distance from pleasure required to 'achieve' connoisseurship. In fact, it's not so different to the
learning and expertise required if you take the approach of Drug, Set, Setting.

Of course, one way round this analytically is to say that
true 'happiness' or 'pleasure' is closer to Aristotle's eudaimonia, or fulfilment - but
that's basically saying these concepts as we actually understand them are redundant. 'I was happy in the haze of a
drunken hour but heaven knows I'm miserable now' only works if these are
neat binary positive/negative concepts - and in this context (and most others) what it really means is
momentary pleasure.
That's not eudaimonia.

Most of the time, we don't live our lives
in those black and white terms - or maybe that's just me. Certainly it's very hard to look at a particular
drinking practice and say that it leads to happiness. But
maybe, again, that's just me.

But I'm not sure that works in quite the
same way for the actual drinking we experience.
I think any discussion of drinking in terms of happiness misses the
point - but in exactly the same way as it would for any other aspect of our
lives. Watching Swindon Town doesn't
(very often) make me 'happy' - but that's not really why I do it. I'm not sure listening to music makes me
'happy', though some specific songs might do.
And should we be aiming for happiness in any case? That's a question for philosophers and sociologists
like Will Davies to answer.

About Me

I live and work in Dorchester, a beautiful town in Dorset not far from the south coast.
I’m a Senior Health Programme Advisor within the team that commissions drug and alcohol treatment services through Public Health Dorset, which operates across Bournemouth, Poole and rural Dorset.
I'm also a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at Bournemouth University.
How did I get here? Well I did a PhD, also at Bournemouth University, looking at ‘binge’ drinking in Bournemouth and thinking about how class and gender are part of how people understand their own and other people’s drinking. (Search on eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk)
After finishing the PhD I moved to London for a couple of years and worked for the Russell Group of universities, dealing most closely with issues of community engagement, widening participation and, unexpectedly, immigration.
When an opportunity came up to head back down to Dorset and work on drug and alcohol issues, I grabbed it with both hands.
I'm on Twitter: @WilliamHaydock